Summary
Overview: Daron Acemoglu is an Institute Professor at MIT, Faculty Co-Director of MIT’s Shaping the Future of Work Initiative, and a Research Affiliate at MIT’s newly established Blueprint Labs. He is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, American Philosophical Society, the British Academy of Sciences, the Turkish Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the European Economic Association, and the Society of Labor Economists. He is also a member of the Group of Thirty. He is the author of six books, including New York Times bestseller Why Nations Fail: Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (joint with James A. Robinson), Introduction to Modern Economic Growth, The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty (with James A. Robinson), and Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (with Simon Johnson). His academic work covers a wide range of areas, including political economy, economic development, economic growth, technological change, inequality, labor economics and economics of networks. Daron Acemoglu has received the inaugural T. W. Shultz Prize from the University of Chicago in 2004, and the inaugural Sherwin Rosen Award for outstanding contribution to labor economics in 2004, Distinguished Science Award from the Turkish Sciences Association in 2006, the John von Neumann Award, Rajk College, Budapest in 2007, the Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, the Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize in 2018, the Global Economy Prize in 2019, and the CME Mathematical and Statistical Research Institute prize in 2021. He was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2024 (with Co-Laureates Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson), the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005, the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in 2012, and the 2016 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award. He holds Honorary Doctorates from the University of Utrecht, the Bosporus University, University of Athens, Bilkent University, the University of Bath, Ecole Normale Superieure, Saclay Paris, and the London Business School.
Source: MIT Economics
OnAir Post: Daron Acemoglu
News
Around the time that MIT economist Daron Acemoglu became one of AI’s most prominent hype-busters, he also won a Nobel Prize.
While those two things are not directly related, Acemoglu says there’s a common thread. Acemoglu and his co-laureates, Simon Johnson and James Robinson, were recognized for their research on how societies with extractive political systems are less prosperous over time than those that emphasize individual rights. Likewise, Acemoglu believes there will be limited financial return from AI that aims to replace human judgment.
“We need investment for alternative approaches to AI, and alternative technologies, those that I would say are more centered on making workers more productive, and providing better information to workers,” Acemoglu says.
Wall Street Journal, – December 29, 2024
Daron Acemoglu, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who recently won the Nobel Prize in economics, worries that artificial intelligence will worsen income inequality and not do all that much for productivity. His friend and colleague David Autor is more hopeful, believing that AI could do just the opposite.
